by Michael Shapiro | Jun 10, 2022 | Stories, Travel
“Come over for lunch. You can help me get a few things done ’round the house. Ever since I hurt my shoulder, I haven’t been able to do any hoovering,” said Dervla Murphy, Ireland’s most intrepid travel writer, when I let her know I was coming to the southern Ireland...
by Michael Shapiro | May 7, 2022 | Blog, Interviews, Music, Stories
Most editors don’t mind if you write a bit longer than assigned. I was asked to write 900 to 1,000 words about Old Crow Medicine Show for The Press Democrat, so it would have been fine, for example, to submit 1,100 words. Yet my interview with bandleader Ketch...
by Michael Shapiro | Feb 17, 2022 | Blog, Interviews, Stories
As I prepared to interview Fran Lebowitz, my friend and colleague Tim Cahill told me that she’d appeared on the cover of Outside magazine. This surprised me so I did a bit of digging and ended up writing this sidebar to accompany my story — click here for...
by Michael Shapiro | Feb 1, 2022 | Books, Interviews, Stories
I may not have chosen a lucrative career but there’s no one better than Peter Coyote to help me see that there are far more valuable riches than money. Bottom line: I didn’t earn much for this story but got to spend nearly three hours with Peter at his...
by Admin | Jan 13, 2022 | Blog, Environment, Interviews, Stories
In 2021, a colleague asked if I’d like to interview Goodall about her Trees for Jane initiative and I leapt at the chance. The best part of this interview may have been hearing about a tree Jane loved when she was a child. She spoke to me from the home her family has...
by Michael Shapiro | Dec 7, 2021 | Blog, Environment, Stories
As a teenager, I awoke every Friday morning at 7am to the shattering sound of our next-door neighbor’s leaf blowers, robbing me of those last precious moments of sleep before school started. I’ve long despised these unnecessary machines for their...
by Admin | Aug 5, 2022 | Blog, Featured, Stories, Travel
In October, 2018, my wife and I joined a group of trekkers led by Jamling Tenzing Norgay, the son of Tenzing Norgay, who in 1953 was the first person (along with Ed Hillary) to reach the top of Mount Everest. For our trek in the Kingdom of Mustang, which borders...
by Admin | Jul 5, 2024 | Featured, Stories, Travel
My editors at National Geographic made it clear to me that they did not want a personal reminiscence about Jan Morris after she died on November 20, 2020. They wanted a piece about Jan’s deep and abiding connection to her adopted home, Wales. She was half Welsh and...
by Michael Shapiro | Feb 9, 2022 | Blog, Interviews, Music, Stories
After a decade of honing his craft and playing gritty clubs, Robert Cray burst onto the blues scene in the mid-1980s and became a global sensation. None other than B.B. King anointed him as the great blues hope who could carry the torch to the next generation. Cray...
by Admin | Feb 5, 2021 | Stories
This essay began forming as I took long walks in April 2020, after being diagnosed with Covid the month before. I focused on the silver linings of the pandemic and how this terrible wave of disease might lead to a more humane future. Here’s an excerpt: This month of...
